Do I
by Dlvvanzor
Summary: He stopped, looking at me dispassionately, and in his eyes I saw... nothing. Well, nothing for me, at least. Based on the song by Luke Bryan but not a songfic. Requested by Sen-Chan21. Happy birthday!


**Disclaimer: I do not own Death Note.**

**A/N: This is a request from Sen-chan21, based on the song 'Do I' by Luke Bryan. Happy birthday, Sen-chan21! I hope it meets your expectations!**

**Warnings: Cheese, fluff, and angst.**

* * *

The door to our apartment slammed or so hard that it shook every single wall in our tiny hellhole of an apartment. The baby in the apartment next door started crying, and then its mother started shrieking at it, which only made it cry more. Mello stormed into the room, grabbing anything in his path and sending it smashing to the floor. Our innocent coffeemaker met an untimely death with a brilliant shatter of glass that I'm sure _should_ have been satisfying, but didn't slow him down at all as he moved on to anything else he could get his hands on, swearing to put a sailor to shame.

I barely looked up from the monitors he left me in charge of twelve hours of every day while he went out and did who knows what, all for the sake of catching a criminal I didn't care about anyway. I didn't love L the way Mello and Near did. With the way Mello's parents died (and mine, as well), I would have thought that Mello would be _for_ Kira. He was for the death penalty, after all.

But it wasn't about catching Kira. It never had been. I didn't think it was even about beating Near anymore. He had had a motive, in the beginning. Now it was just... Mello. Just obsession.

"Hi," I hazarded. He would never hit me, of course, but even _I_ wasn't above a good screaming-at. Except, he hadn't even done much of that in the last few months. Hadn't even really, you know, _looked_ at me.

He ignored me. Didn't acknowledge me even with a nod as made his destructive way into our bedroom, where I heard the door slam again and our only remaining lamp crashing into the window, which also sounded like it shattered.

I sighed to myself. It would of course be my job to clean that all up. That's how Mello has always been. He gets himself in over his head and, out of love, I dig him out of whatever shithole he got himself into.

Except the Mafia. That one, I didn't think even _I_ could fix. I didn't know if I would be able to save him this time around. I would sure as hell try. I'd try until it killed me, if it was for him. What better way to die than for the one you love?

Even if you were starting to suspect that _he_ didn't love _you_.

I mean, I knew he did. Of course he did; we were Matt and Mello. It was _understood_ that if one of us was there, the other was probably close behind. He was the passion and I was the calm. We couldn't exist without each other, and we had the most intense (mutually abusive?) relationship anyone had ever seen. This was all 'understood.' It went without saying.

I think now it was more 'understood' than actually applicable in practice. If you asked him if he still loved me, he would say 'of course,' but it wasn't like it used to be, when it was so good. When he was so mad about me that he'd go batshit crazy when someone hurt me, or even _upset_ me. He used to come to me about everything, big or small, and laugh with me or weep in my arms. He would hold me all night long after we made love, and when I woke up he would still be there, usually watching me. He would randomly grab me and kiss me anytime, anywhere, even in public. And I didn't care, because as much as he loved me, I loved him more.

I've _always_ loved him more. From the moment I met him, I loved him more than any language has words for. I'd die for him in a heartbeat. On the day he loved me most, at the pinnacle of his love for me, he _still_ only loved me half as much as I loved him on the very first day we met.

And so I still loved him, even if he was making it clear he didn't want me anymore.

I heard him, from our room, start in on the wall. He was so strong, but the wall was plaster and would win. He had broken his hand once, that way, and I had had to trick him into going to the hospital, literally leading him to the car by distracting him with a kiss and back-walking him to it. He hadn't been pleased when I sat him down in the passenger seat, straddling him and kissing him, and then buckled him in. It had taken him that long to figure it out.

I hurried to our room, quietly opening the door.

He didn't notice, and if I didn't already love every single centimeter of him inside and out with every particle of my being, I would have fallen in love at that moment.

He had managed to put a few holes in the wall already, blood dripping from the split skin of his knuckles. He was yelling mostly incoherently, eyes wild, and through one of the holes in the wall I could see our neighbor staring at him wide-eyed, frozen and terrified by this monster. He was beaten and limping and still moving, some of his clothes torn and a black eye already forming.

That summarized what I loved about him the most. That, right there. He was and had always been stark raving mad, powerful, strong, on fire. He was absolutely those things, but _inside_ he was different. Inside he was small and scared and desperate and dependant and gentle and guilty and they all came out at different times in different ways depending on the mood of his fiery outsides. He had been deleting those things lately. He hated himself so much sometimes that I wished he could comprehend how much I loved him, because then he could never look at himself the same way again.

The consequences of approaching an angry monster didn't matter. All that I cared about was getting him to stop hurting himself, so I strode right up to him and hugged him from behind, hard.

"Please, Mels, calm down."

It had worked a million times before, but today he just ignored me and kept beating the shit out of the wall.

"Mello!" I swung my body around to his front and grabbed him by both sides of the face, holding him. "You're hurting yourself. Please. Stop."

He stopped, looking at me dispassionately, and in his eyes I saw... nothing. Well, nothing for _me_, at least. They used to go soft when he looked at me. I wanted that back so much. So much.

"You're right. I should be working, anyway," he said impassively, pecking me on the lips.

Nothing.

He pulled away from me and walked out of the room, going straight to his computer.

I stood there for a long, long time. It was the first time that I had ever considered the fact that it was perfectly possible that he might actually leave me. That he might, in fact, walk out the door and just never come back. Somehow that thought had never occurred to me before.

It was my fault. It must be, since Mello hadn't really changed; it was in his nature to be all over the place. Maybe _I_ had changed. I just had to figure out how, so I could change back and fix everything. I didn't care to be 'me' if 'me' wasn't what worked with Mello. Whatever worked with Mello _was_ 'me.'

I wasn't enough, somehow.

That was it. Maybe, the fact that I was the only constant in his life was a _bad_ thing. Maybe he had always felt that way and it was only now coming out, because of the stress of the Kira case.

I wasn't enough.

He was my life, and I gave him all of me, and it wasn't enough. What could I do? I didn't have any more to give- he had it all. Did he still even _like_ me? Did a kiss from me mean _anything_ to him, or was it just a meaningless physical habit? Did the fact that I loved him so much and wanted him so badly even register on an emotional level to him anymore? If I were to strip right now, cover myself in chocolate, and get on his lap, would he be even _remotely_ turned on?

For the first time, I honestly didn't know the answer.

I didn't leave the bedroom that night but I didn't sleep either, staring blankly at the ceiling until he came in at two o'clock in the morning.

I was jolted out of my daze by his hands running gently up my sides. His touch made me shiver, but not because of his cold hands but because they were _his_ hands. Damn it, I still wanted him. I didn't even want to _not_ want him.

"Hey, you're still awake," he stated emotionlessly.

"Yeah," I answered promptly, allowing him to, as usual, tug my shirt up off me, not stopping him as his hands slid down to undo my jeans. I leaned up to kiss him and he allowed it but didn't return it. When I moved to unlace his leather, I noticed that he was already hard. So I was officially just a place to empty his balls. Fantastic.

It was perfunctory at best, possibly even moreso than it had been for a while, and he came long before I did. He had the common decency to not leave me blueballing; he sucked me off quickly and then got dressed and left with a brief kiss to my lips.

I finally slept, on his side of the bed, on the pillow that used to smell like him but no longer did because he hadn't spent the night on it in what seemed like months.

* * *

When I woke up, he wasn't there and I wasn't surprised. He must have worked through the whole night again. I was willing to bet that he hadn't eaten anything besides chocolate in a few days, either.

In a trance, I stumbled over to the kitchen. I wanted him to eat something so that he didn't die of malnutrition. I absently made hot chocolate and a plate of eggs the way he preferred them. I placed them by the compute where, by observation, I had learned that he usually put food while working. He glanced at it, grunted a thanks, and kept typing.

I leaned in from behind him and placed a kiss on the top of his hair. He smelled just like himself, and I almost cried. No, it didn't make sense. Mello wasn't the kind that would stay with someone he didn't like. I was being stupid, insecure. There was really no reason to believe that, from one incident, he didn't care about me anymore.

Except it hadn't been one incident. It had been three months worth of incidents, and only my extreme denial could ever have let me ignore it for so long. It had been three months of him only stopping for a drive-by fuck, three months of him barely grazing my lips when he kissed me, three months of hardly saying a word to me, three months of coming home shitfaced after thirty-six hours out. Three months, I realized with the weight of finality, since he had actually said that he loved me.

I always knew I loved him more than he loved me. Really, this seemed the natural progression of something such as this.

If I could just hear the words... even if he didn't mean them anymore...

"I love you, Mello," I mumbled into his hair, petting his head.

"Love you too," he said distractedly.

I was wrong. Hearing it didn't help, when he didn't even sound like he meant it.

I slumped, something in me crumbling. He just... smelled like him, even when nothing was the same and all I wanted in the entire world was to have him back to the way he was- the way he loved me.

"It's over, isn't it?" I whispered, trying not to cry as I let my forehead descend to his shoulder.

"Not just yet, but it's _so_ close."

Wow. I never thought I would truly hear those words from him. I expected him to lie, I guess, or at least not sound so... _excited_ about it.

My heart was breaking. No, breaking was the wrong word. Even 'shattering' wasn't right. It was more like it was splitting straight down the middle, tearing in half, heart fibers straining to stay together until the force of the hurt (the _agony) _pulled them apart, dangling bloodily in the chasm between the halves.

"Oh," I managed. I was impressed with how calm I sounded, when everything inside of me was howling with pain. "So, should I find somewhere else to live, then?"

He tilted his head slightly, not taking his eyes off the screen. "A new place? I guess you can if you want to."

I could have laughed. If I _wanted_ to? If I _wanted_ to be away from the most incredible person in the world? The person who had, at one time, loved me?

I had been with him since I was twelve. I had met him when I was four, loving him instantly before I was even capable of romantic love. I had never looked at anyone but him, never loved anyone but him, never felt _anything_ (even friendship) for anyone that was not him. Now I was _nineteen_. How do you get over someone you've loved for fifteen years? ...How could _he_?

"All right," I said weakly. "I'll have one by tomorrow."

"Sounds good," he said vaguely. "That could be fun. Good idea."

It took every ounce of self-control that I had to pull myself away from him and go find a newspaper, which we usually used to cover the holes he made in our walls. _His_ walls, since I was now out of here.

My nose was itching, which is how I knew I was going to cry. I didn't want to cry in front of my ex-lover, so I brought the paper with me to our room.

I shut the door behind me, and I was alone. I had literally never been this alone in my entire life, because I had always had Mello.

I sat down on the bed, put my face in my hands, and lost time.

* * *

It was dark when I felt Mello's arms around me, felt his lips in my hair. I instantly snapped back to life. For a moment, I melted against the familiar touch- it was just like it used to be, before he had... dumped me... and that smell again. That smell was all over me.

Then I remembered that he wasn't mine anymore, even though I would always be his.

And even if he kicked me to the curb, he could still have what he was asking for right now. I waited for his hands to go to the hem of my shirt as usual when he visited me late at night, but they didn't.

Confused, I turned around to look at him.

He was... grinning. Actually _grinning_. He hadn't grinned in so long that I hadn't even _noticed_ that he had stopped grinning.

"Matt, I did it."

I gazed at that grin, memorizing it. Apparently we were still going to be best friends. Good. It was better than nothing. "Did what, Mello?" I asked exhaustedly.

"Figured out who Kira is, idiot!"

I stared at him. "What?"

"I figured out who Kira is! It's this Japanese guy. Long story. But, Matt, I found actual proof, and I gave it to the Japanese police, and they moved in and they _just caught him_. They shot him and he had a heart attack. Just desserts, huh? But, I did it without Near!"

"That's great, Mello." If I hadn't just lost everything in the world that mattered to me, I would probably even care.

Whereas before he had been too busy getting over me to notice that I was breaking, now he was simply too excited to.

"It's all over. I did it. Kira is toast, L is avenged, and I already rubbed Near's freakish albino face in it. We have to celebrate. Did you find a new place for us, yet?"

_That_ caught my attention. "For... us?"

"Yeah, didn't you say you wanted to look for a new apartment? Or maybe we could get an actual house! We could do either: you have _no idea_ how big the reward for catching Kira was."

My mind screeched to a halt. I blinked at him. "So... do you still love me?"

He raised an eyebrow. "Do I... what are you talking about?" He laughed. "When have I ever stopped loving you?" He smiled and his eyes got far away, but this time it was in a dream and he squeezed me closer. "We could go back to England and get a real house. You could pick it. We could get a dog. We could get gay married. Haha, I mean, I know we're already married, but we could make it legal." We were married? "We could be the gay couple with the dogs for kids! Hell, we could adopt babies and be sickeningly domestic! Those would be some pretty fucking screwed up kids, but damn would they ever be _loved_." At the expression on my face, he amended, "Or just the dogs. And I could have a boring office job. And you could test video games. But we'd be happy working because we'd know that we're secretly disgustingly rich and don't need the jobs, so if we got tired of them we could just up and leave. We could go all over the world together, Matt. We're completely free."

I just looked at him for a long time, adoring him. "Mello, I've gotta say. You turn into a real asshole when you're focused."

He laughed. "Do I?"


End file.
